122600-2172015-morning-coffee-the-late-nights-and-early-mornings-edition
Content ---- ---- ---- If you need anything mechari side, I should be free after 4pm est. | |} ---- Thanks, i probably won't be on then, maybe a little, depends on plans for this evening. Just looked and kinda disappointed that a name change is $20 =( I don't like the name i choose for my medic and was gonna change it, but i guess im stuck with it now. | |} ---- ---- I can try and bribe my wife to be on a dominion character earlier than 4? She is kinda sore at the dominion after running all the quests around blight-haven and not being able to get the strain chest. There are still the giant quests, but there wasn't the pop to run them. She, isn't a big fan of open world questing. | |} ---- ---- Its okay, its not something to has to be done right away ^_^ I appreciate it though. My medic is only level 35 so still gots lots of leveling to get through. | |} ---- ---- We can add normal MT and CoW to this weekend's content list, if you'd like. Hopefully, Parthenia will be 50 by then, so we'll have a plug-and-play healer in the group. I was waiting to see Naunet on before running that CoW, but I don't mind running both normals so that we can get acclimated before running vets. | |} ---- I've got two sets of claws (one dps, one tank) that need Vet Crimelords for imbuement. Elsa just needs a bit of rep before she's on the Adeventure stage herself (and holy cow, Pyralos really got hammered with the nerfbat). I'm hoping Crimelords runs aren't one-and-done :lol: As it is, I'm getting close to just queuing for the things or getting serious about advertising for a group in the LFG channel. | |} ---- I'm kind of sad about that. I loved the disco inferno. :( You can always roll the dice in the queues. I'm not entirely sure what standard my gear is up to. I'm still using a lot of the Adventus stuff Nephele made me ages ago. At the time, I was told it was good to get me into Vet Adventures, but I wanted to make sure before I said I'd definitely run the vet adventures. What kind of ilvl would I need? | |} ---- ---- It's still a mechanics fight but... the extinguishers activate (much) faster. The biggest change is that the bombs don't knock you over the edge anymore. *coughs* I still died three times on the first attempt or two. Crafted gear is funny. I'm in a mix of Adventus, Epochos and a Warden LitheTek coat. My PvP gearscore for my PvE gear is sitting around 115. Sometimes the "lower" piece just has better stats. Regardless the common wisdom is if you're in that level of gear and have fully populated your runes with appropriate runesets you're good for Vet. Dungeons (see the Gear Snob discussion). I'm sitting at just under 3kAP so I should be good to go. | |} ---- ---- Okay, you've got a tank then! Let's see if we can rush Parth to 50 and get her decked out as soon as possible. We could really use a dedicated healer; I know a lot of people can heal but would rather not. | |} ---- -raises hand- me me me, choose me! If only i could be on more for when you guys are on =( | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Absolutely. | |} ---- Yes they can Cycotik. Even on Veteran they're not that hard. But take some people along, they're quite fun in group. | |} ---- ---- ---- If you're talking about heading a storyline, I've been there before. It happens and, of the two potential problems (bloat versus atrophy), it's the better one to have. RP has a tendency to run roughshod because, of course, we aren't characters in a novel, we're ALL our own little characters with our own agendas, our own ways of going about things. Every RP "thread" fights three diametrically opposed forces: -The Willow Tree Effect. This happens when branching storylines seem to take off, then peter out, leaving people who participated out in the middle of nowhere and the main thrust of the story completely disintegrated. There's not much to be done for this except to try to keep the main storyline going, but in a way where people can drop in or out of the story. I tend to counter it by doing what I call "stringing", i.e. setting someone up as a "substoryteller" and letting them run with that thread towards a certain goal. That way, even if they do splinter off, once they accomplish their objective, they come back. It's just a matter of synchonizing. A good example would be if a couple people seem to be grouping, wanting to run some kind of action RP while you're focusing on intrigue. Give them something to do, tell them that "to get in, I need a diversion, which means I need you to break in here at this place to draw off the guards from where we are. Make it as loud as possible. Character X, you're in charge of making that happen." They get to go do their thing, and may make the story more interesting for them. You can continue on, and everyone meets afterwards. -The Chunky Salsa Effect. This happens when storylines tend to bubble from within, meaning that people inside the storyline are "playing" different stories. It generally happens when a tangent storyline doesn't fully leave, often over confusion over what's going on in the story. It happens when someone, for instance, mistakes a character of vital importance for a nobody and kills him. That happened once during a long storyline where, during an interrogation, one of the characters simply cut off our hostage's head. He was the only one that knew anything. The way to deal with this if it's undesirable (as sometimes it is), is to "puree" your storyline. Reduce it. Get everyone back on track by chopping everything up and making sure everyone, no matter where they are, knows they're in the same soup. They will re-cluster together. In the above example, you may have to go a different route to get the information and play from the fly, but once you have it, you puree, and you say, "We've got the information, step 2!" Everyone will fall in line again. -The 4th Wall Effect. This happens when storylines are not attacked from within RP, but from OOC. It's probably the hardest to deal with. The others, there are story methods to deal with things. OOC disintegration, though, is sometimes out of your control. There are times when someone will take exception to a story element and say it doesn't work "in the lore", which will often kick off a fight. This happens when RP relationships "bleed" into OOC and then change for the worse, or when someone does something obviously foolish or ridiculous, or when someone suddenly has a lore nazi kick. There's not much you can do but put on your RP hat, say your piece, and continue on. Now, if you're talking about random RP that you're just trying to break into, that's actually an easier problem to deal with. The best thing I can say is to know what kind of character you have. There are really three kinds of RP characters: reactors, actors, and drivers. Some are introverts, followers, and low key characters that will only RP if approached and drawn in, and those are reactors. Actors generally act on present factors, and thus are always on the lookout for something to action on. Then you've got your drivers, characters who, by their very presence, can kick start RP because they're the kind that will act independently, approach actors and reactors, etc. Oddly, a lot of RPers tend to play reactive characters simply because they're reactive people IRL, and it's often very hard to RP something you're not personally capable of in real life. While we've had a few millenia of fiction to callous us to the idea of our characters killing someone, and a few decades of thinking of serial killers, there are some things it's very hard to surmount. You can't be really charming and engaging if you aren't capable of being charming and engaging in real life. You can't convincingly play an intelligent and ordered villain if you are not personally smart enough or calculating enough to pull it off, it simply doesn't translate. This isn't an insult to anyone. I don't play women at all in games because I know how unconvincing I am at it. I'm just not really that in touch with my feminine side; I can't even really hint at it because I can't really do that in real life. I've had very little practice with how to engage with women on that level, so my ability to mimic one just seems roughshod. My women I play have always, no matter how hard I try, seemed more like men trying to pass themselves off as women. So if a roleplayer don't know how to kick-start a conversation IRL, or engage actively in one IRL, that person will tend towards reactive characters almost exclusively. Conversely, if someone has a hard time ignoring people or just sitting around, they're going to tend towards more active or driving characters. One thing I can say is that, if you want to break into RP, a driving character has a VERY distinct advantage, and an acting character is always that one driving character away from full-on engagement. Having a reactive character get into RP requires a bit of (or really a lot of) help, so they're best played in tandem with people you already know. So if you want to get engaged, you might need to switch to another character. Know the situation you're walking into, though, because if a story is bloating with a lot of people pulling in a lot of directions, you may simply have too many driving characters. Driving characters can get very obnoxious in numbers, especially if they're pulling the limited numbers of acting characters every which way. If that's the case, sometimes you just have to act and go, pick a thread and follow it. The best advice I can give is know your own character. If your character has a strong concept and a less waffley interior, you will know what to do because your character will essentially choose it for you. Better yet, when people know your character and what that character does, players of all stripe of character will come to you directly to plug you into a role. Whether your character is a, "I know how to get that done, let's go get that done!" type, or a "Yeah, I'm down to ride, let me get my coat," type, or a "Oh Hell no, I'll hack the terminal, but I'm not walking into an Eldan facility and putting my life in your hands," type, they'll know who you are and what you can do. Everything smooths out then. Stay true to the character you play, and if you want a change, just change characters. You'll find the RP gets simpler and more direct that way. | |} ---- Well, a hearty welcome back! :D Keep an eye out if you're on late for Casim, he's itching to run vets with capable people. | |} ---- So many amazing houses out there - they really should be entered into the current Lifestyles competition you know :) | |} ---- This is a really interesting discussion and I think I agree with a lot of what you're saying here Vic. From a practical standpoint, the way we tried to avoid this with the RP things that we're doing in the Daggers (keep in mind, we're "light" RP) was to actually have a central storyline that the RP events revolved around, and present it episodically. So we approached the Fallen to Darkness concept almost as if we were writing a script for a tv miniseries - each episode advanced the overarching plot in some way, but everyone got the chance to roleplay around that and develop their characters against each other. So far it's been a big success. It's kept everyone who has participated engaged and interested, and prevented us from running into a lot of the problems that you mentioned. It has also - somewhat - spawned spinoffs where people are continuing to RP things with their characters that happened during one of the episodes. We'll be wrapping up the storyline soon so it will be interesting to see what happens next, but it seems like it's been a really good approach for us and I'd recommend it to any guild or group that wants to get some regular RP going but is worried about the problems that you mentioned here. | |} ---- So far, I've played the RP small-ball. In keeping with the tradition of our guild, I usually do one-offs when I've got people together. Finishing the Shadowcaster is my paramount concern as RP officer right now, because as far as I'm concerned, the best thing I can do as GM of our particular guild is to give us a setting. I've done epic storytelling before (now that Casim and Rad are around, ask one of them about Volins, that was probably one of my proudest accomplishments as a roleplayer and storyteller both), but the Blazing Saddles are such a loose organization IC and OOC that I don't really think it would be right for us to put together long, drawn out stories except in only the vaguest ways. However, I think that the best RP is the RP that fits, not the RP you force. Your RP works extremely well for the Daggers because you're a much more organized and straightforward guild, and organized and straightforward RP works well that way. My plans at this moment are to finish the Caster, then start throwing together one-offs, especially dungeon and content IC runs. That was my favorite thing to do in WoW after a while. I did the elongated story thing with the Skulldance Clan, but we had the most fun on story nights (when we essentially got to make up war stories on the spot) and in IC dungeon runs. So as soon as the Shadowcaster is finished and our Thaydfest events are all wrapped up, I'll probably start putting together RP nights for just random bar crawls, war story chatter, and IC content runs. The best fun I've had so far in RP, all things considered, was running around with Kitty, Taerse, and a pair of people from the WSRP channel and tossing our random RPness while we were clearing out quests. I'll probably focus on that more when the content side of things gets levied on an officer. Right now, Vanica and Castark have some IRL stuff to handle, so I've been handling the content running as well (mostly normal stuff for all our lower level and new players; I want to make sure they're having fun and not thinking all the good times are being had over their heads!) But I can't wait to just run random content ICly, go after world bosses, and go out hunting rares. Once I know I have enough healers to throw together, we'll be good to go! So in an administrative role, it's always best to not force it. I know there's sort of a sweep for big, long, epic storylines that people will follow, but Nephele's 100% right here about chopping it up into smaller, easier-to-swallow bits. That's how the Daggers work, you make the RP fit the guild. If RP fits the players, it'll be the best time they've ever had! :D | |} ---- You do kind of need reactive characters for anything to happen. IRL I can be a real pain to deal with due to the fact that I just do things. Unless it involves my other half, it's never going to be "We are going to X" It's "I'm going to X and the rest of you can come along, or not." Most people don't just claw on to that kind of thing, RP is generally interaction rather than the wake of direct action. . | |} ---- ---- I'm not saying any one kind is more necessary than the others. I think what was described was a case of "too many chefs in the kitchen". If a scene is full of too many driving characters, the entire scene quivers like a mass of jello. It moves, but not in any direction, since a ton of people are trying to pull the story along in different directions, but there's not enough people going with them. Of course, if you have too many reactive people, nothing ever happens. That's the nightmare scenario of thirty people sitting in dark corners of a bar (somehow) minding their own business and scowling at their beer, awkwardly trying to invite someone to care about their problems but not having the character type necessary to go find someone to talk about them with. You get sort of the same thing with too many acting people. My buddy likes to call that "drama salad". That's when you've got everyone chatting and waiting for something to kick off. It works better than the other two scenarios; at least that one makes a good tea-party RP because people talk and react to one another. But it never goes anywhere. RP is usually these three kinds of characters interacting in chains, with a story driver instigating something, actors responding to it, and both dragging reactive people with them. Or, it can start backwards, with an actor reacting to a reactor, then going to a driver to deal with whatever the reactor needs done. As a matter of rule, though, the driver tends to find RP wherever they go because they instigate action and conversation. They just need other characters in balance to make that work, or they're not driving anything anywhere. I'll probably get to see you guys either really late tonight or tomorrow night after I finish the TL;DR. Band practice is fun, but I usually don't get home until after 11. | |} ---- ---- ---- Hey, not a bad thing, right? Having LFGs full of people? :D | |} ---- ---- ----